With Grocery Prices Up, Families Turn To Food Waste Apps

Restaurants, grocers, and cafes can put together surprise bags of surplus food that would have otherwise been thrown out and sell it for a third of the original cost to users on the Too Good to Go app. The app was designed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that accompany food waste while giving businesses a way to recoup losses and consumers a less expensive way to access good food.

Fundación Paraguaya is helping drastically redefine the way that poverty is identified, defined, and addressed. Through a simple, interactive, mobile-based survey called "Poverty Spotlight", workers can self-assess their level of poverty. They are then paired with microfinance agents to develop a plan to tackle their own unique challenges, with assistance in the form of training, technology, or small loans.

In Rwanda, a fleet of simple, efficient trucks is helping farmers get their harvest to market before the goods spoil. For one farmer renting space in one of the trucks, the improved market access enabled them to go from selling 400 to 4,000 kilograms of produce a week.

Food Rescue Hero collects surplus food and distributes it to those in need. Volunteers use the organization’s app to accept deliveries, pick them up from the donor, and deliver them to individuals and organizations that distribute the food.

Kitovu Technology is a social enterprise that aims to use data and technology to help farmers in Nigeria increase their crop yields and access new markets. Since 2017, the company has trained over 300 agents to work with about 12,000 farmers on using the mobile app to track their progress. The company also partnered with the government on a pilot program to introduce an electronic warehouse system to allow farmers to store their grains.

Les Alchimistes is a social enterprise outside of Paris that turns the 900,000 tons of food waste produced every year into compost that is then sold to farmers. The group is supported by industrial composters named Tidy Planet who have managed to speed up the natural composting process from 6-12 months to less than two weeks. The Alchimistes have six composting sites across France, and they rely on city cyclists to pick up the food waste from each participating restaurant.

After realizing the rate that which food gets thrown away at grocery stores due to approaching expiration dates, one man in Nigeria decided to do something about it. Oscar Ekponimo created a web-based app that lets grocery store retailers know if something is near expiration. Once notified, the retailers mark down the item; this allows non-governmental organizations to purchase and sell to people that are food insecure.

Technology can help reduce food waste. Olio and Winnow are two examples. Olio is an app that allows people to easily exchange extra or unwanted food for free. Winnow is a smart trash can that calculates the cost of waste in commercial kitchens, inspiring chefs to be more creative to save both food and money.

While the USPS has seen a drastic decline in revenues and capacity in recent years due to growing competition from the private sector and social changes, First Class Meal is reimagining the role that this institution has to play: improving national access to healthy food. Using the existing USPS app to connect organizations and food banks that struggle to distribute donations, postal drivers out on their normal routes would pick up donations, deliver to food banks or pantries, and store food in post offices with excess capacity.

To address the food insecurity problem among its low-income students, Columbia University launched Swipes, a meal sharing app in which students with a surplus of “meal swipes” could donate them to students in need. But when that app struggled to function and roll out properly, Columbia looked downtown to New York University, where student Jon Chin launched a similarly purposed but more effectively designed app, Share Meals. So far, the app has enabled over a thousand meal donations, and is hoping to work with Columbia to share its code and expand its donor services.